During the early days of production on Some Like It Hot, writer-director Billy Wilder brought in the Texas-born drag artist Barbette (né Vander Clyde), whom he knew from her acclaimed performances in Berlin and Paris in the late 1920s and early 30s, to work with lead actors Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. This talk aims to chronicle the story of Barbette, whose work as a cross-dressing vaudeville and circus artist became an international sensation, catching the discerning eye of young “Billie” who was then working as a freelance reporter in Weimar Berlin. The granular details of that collaboration have not yet been fully presented; we don’t yet know, for instance, the deep background of Barbette and her wider impact in Europe and at home. In 1969, she was made the subject of a New Yorker profile, “An Angel, a Flower, a Bird,” by the Jean Cocteau-biographer Francis Steegmuller (Cocteau was thoroughly transfixed by her, writing a tribute “Le numéro Barbette” in the mid 1920s and hiring photographer Man Ray to immortalize her on film, and then casting her in his debut experimental film Le Sang d’un Poète of 1930). There is also considerable speculation that she may even have served as the chief inspiration for Viktor und Viktoria (dir. Reinhold Schünzel, 1933). Drawing on primary research conducted at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, and at archives of the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, this lecture will zero in on that specific story within the context of the larger production history surrounding what many consider to be the greatest American sex comedy. 

Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film and Associate Dean for Professional Programs at the University of Texas at Austin. He serves as the Executive Director the university’s internship-based, study-away programs in Los Angeles (UTLA) and New York City (UTNY). The author, most recently, of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), a Los Angeles Times bestseller, his anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment, is now out in paperback from Princeton University Press.